How to Create Stop Motion Animation with Kids

Did you ever wonder how animation works? With a few simple household items and a smartphone you can create your own stop motion animation with kids right in your home. Our family had the opportunity to create our own animation using Goldfish Crackers and it was a blast. Find out how you can create your own Stop Motion Animation for a chance to win $5,000 below!

What is Stop Motion Animation?

Stop motion animation is a filming technique done by making objects appear like they are moving on their own. This is a technique used in claymation. It is done by moving an object in small increments and then taking a photo after each movement. Each photo is called a frame. Traditional animation is 24 frames per second, so you need to make sure you have enough frames to show movement. Once all of the frames are put together you have a stop motion animation!

How to Create a Stop Motion Animation with Kids

Come up with an idea for your animation. It helps to write down your idea and to create a storyboard (sequence of drawings) to help work out your idea.

What are you going to animate? We used Goldfish Crackers for our animation. They are bright, colorful, and easy to use. The crackers can be used for a simple animation like ours to a more advanced animation. The possibilities are endless. We also knew we wanted clouds in our stop motion animation so we crinkled up tissue paper to create our clouds.

Create a backdrop for your animation. We used watercolors and paper to make ours, but you can also use markers, colored pencils, and/or other craft material that you have on hand.

Download a stop motion app to your phone. We used Stop Motion Studio to create ours. It is very user friendly plus it is free!

You want your phone or tablet to stay still while you are taking pictures for the frames so it is important to use a phone stand/holder to keep your phone still for you.

Time to animate! Place your backdrop down on the table. We put a little piece of tape on the back of ours to help hold it in place. Then put your phone in the holder.

Next put your object where you want to start moving it from in the frame. We wanted our clouds to slowly come in, so we had them come in from the left side of the frame. Use the animation app take a picture. Move the object slightly, take another picture. Move it again, take another picture. Keep doing those steps until you have completed the movements you want to show. *TIP- The closer the move, the slower your object will appear to move. The further apart you move your object, the quicker it will appear to move.

Play your stop motion animation for family and friends!

Using stop motion animation with kids is not only educational, it is also ton of fun and lets their imagination soar. Creating our animation together as a family has been so much fun. I see family movie nights turning into stop motion animation nights. My son now wants to be a Stop Motion Animator when he grows up. How cool is that?!